From SILENT SPRING By Rachel Carson .docx

From SILENT SPRING By Rachel Carson
A FABLE FOR TOMORROW
There was once a town in the heart of America where all life
seemed to live in harmony with its
surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of
prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of
orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above
the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch
set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a
backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer
silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall
mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder,
great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler's eye through
much of the year.
Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty,
where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on
the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The
countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and
variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was
pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from
great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the
streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and
contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the
days many years ago when the first settlers raised
their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns.
Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began
to change. Some evil spell had settled on the
community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens;
the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere
was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness
among their families. In the town the doctors had become

more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing
among their patients. There had been several sudden and
unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among
children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play
and die within a few hours.
There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example where
had they gone? Many people spoke of them,
puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards
were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were
moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a
spring without voices. On the mornings that had once
throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays,
wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now
no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.
On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The
farmers complained that they were unable to
raise any pigs the litters were small and the young survived
only a few days. The apple trees were coming into
bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no
pollination and there would be no fruit.
The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned
and withered vegetation as though swept
by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things.
Even the streams were now lifeless. Anglers no longer
visited them, for all the fish had died.
In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the
roofs, a white granular powder still showed a
few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the
roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams.
No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new
life in this stricken world. The people had
done it them selves.
This town does not actually exist, but it might easily have a
thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere
in the world. I know of no community that has experienced all
the misfortunes I describe. Yet every one of these

disasters has actually happened somewhere, and many real
communities have already suffered a substantial number
of them. A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and
this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark
reality we all shall know.
What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless
towns in America? This book is an attempt to
explain.
The Obligation to Endure
The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is
the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with
dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the
most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not
only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is
for the most part irreversible. In this now universal
contam ination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister
and little recognized partners of radiation in changing
the very nature of the world the very nature of its life.
Strontium go, re leased through nuclear explosions into the
air, comes to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in
soil enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there,
and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being,
there to remain until his death. Similarly, chemicals
sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long in soil,,
entering into living organisms, passing from one to
another in a chain of poisoning and death. Or they pass
mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and,
through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new
forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work
unknown liarm on those who drink from once pure wells. As
Albert Schweitzer has said, "Man can hardly even
recognize the devils of his own creation."

It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that
now inhabits the earth eons of time in which
that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a
state of adjustment and balance with its surroundings.
The environ ment, rigorously shaping and directing the life it
supported, contained elements that were hostile as well
as supporting. Cer tain rocks gave out dangerous radiation; even
within the light of the sun, from which all life
draws its energy, there were shortwave radiations with power to
injure. Given time time not in years but in
millennia life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time
is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world
there is no time.
The rapidity of change and the speed with which new
situa tions are created follow the impetuous and
heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.
Radiation is no longer merely the background
radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the
ultraviolet of the sun that have existed before there was any
life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural crea tion of man's
tampering with the atom. The chemicals to which life
is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the
calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the
minerals washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the
sea; they are the synthetic creations of man's inventive
mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in
nature.
To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale
that is nature's; it would require not merely the
years of a man's life but the life of generations. And even this,
were it by some miracle possible, would be futile, for
the new chemicals come from our laboratories in an endless
stream; almost five hundred annually find their way into
actual use in the United States alone. The figure is staggering
and its implications are not easily grasped 5oo new

chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required
somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally
outside the limits of biologic experience.
Among them are many that are used in man's war against
nature. Since the midi940's over 2oo basic
chemicals have been created for use in killing insects, weeds,
rodents, and other organisms described in the modern
vernacular as "pests"; and they are sold under several thousand
different brand names. These sprays, dusts, and
aerosols are now applied almost uni versally to farms, gardens,
forests, and homesnonselective chemicals that have
the power to kill every insect, the “good" and the "bad," to still
the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the
streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on
in soil all this though the intended target may be only
a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay
down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the
earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be
called "insecticides," but "biocides."
The whole process of spraying seems caught up in an endless
spiral. Since DDT was released for civilian
use, a process of escalation has been going on in which ever
more toxic materials must be found. This has happened
because insects, in a trium phant vindication of Darwin's
principle of the survival of the fittest, have evolved super
races immune to the particular in secticide used, hence a
deadlier one has always to be developed and then a deadlier
one than that. It has happened also be cause, for reasons to be
described later, destructive insects often undergo a
"flareback," or resurgence, after spraying, in numbers greater
than before. Thus the chemical war is never won, and
all life is caught in its violent crossfire. Along with
the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear
war, the central problem of our age has therefore be come the
contamination of man's total environment with such
substances of incredible potential for harmsubstances that

accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even
pene trate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of
heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.
Some wouldbe architects of our future look toward a time
when it will be possible to alter the human germ
plasm by design. But we may easily be doing so now by
inadvertence, for many chemicals, like radiation, bring
about gene mutations. It is ironic to think that man might
determine his own future by something so seemingly
trivial as the choice of an insect spray.
All this has been riskedfor what? Future historians may well be
amazed by our distorted sense of
proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few
unwanted species by a method that contaminated the
entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death
even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we
have done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse
the moment we examine them. We are told that the
enormous and expanding use of pesticides is necessary to
maintain farm production. Yet is our real problem not one
of overproduction,? Our farms, despite measures to remove
acreages from production and to pay farmers not to
produce, have yielded such a staggering excess of crops that the
American taxpayer in i962 is paying out more than
one billion dollars a year as the total carrying cost of the
surplusfood storage program. And is the situation helped
when one branch of the Agriculture Department tries to reduce
production while another states, as it did in i958, "It
is believed generally that reduction of crop acreages under
provisions of the Soil Bank will stimulate interest in use
of chemicals to obtain maximum production on the land retained
in crops."
All this is not to say there is no insect problem and no need of
control. I am saying, rather, that control must
he geared to realities, not to mythical situations, and that the
methods em ployed must be such that they do not

destroy us along with the insects.
The problem whose attempted solution has brought such a train
of disaster in its wake is an accompaniment
of our modern way of life. Long before the age of man, insects
inhabited the earth a group of extraordinarily varied
and adaptable beings. Over the course of time since man's
advent, a small percentage of the more than half a million
species of insects have come into conflict with human welfare
in two principal ways: as competitors for the food
supply and as carriers of human disease.
Diseasecarrying insects become important where human be ings
are crowded together, especially under
conditions where sanitation is poor, as in time of natural
disaster or war or in situations of extreme poverty and
deprivation. Then control of some sort becomes necessary. It is
a sobering fact, however, as we shall presently see,
that the method of massive chemical control has had only
limited success, and also threatens to worsen the very
conditions it is intended to curb.
Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few
insect problems. These arose with the
intensification of agricul ture the devotion of immense acreages
to a single crop. Such a system set the stage for
explosive increases in specific insect populations. Singlecrop
farming does not take advantage of the principles by
which nature works; it is agriculture as an engineer might
conceive it to be. Nature has introduced great variety into
the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying
it. Thus he undoes the builtin checks and balances by
which nature holds the species within bounds. One impor tant
natural check is a limit on the amount of suitable
habitat for each species. Obviously then, an insect that lives on
wheat can build up its population to much higher

levels on a farm devoted to wheat than on one in which wheat is
intermingled with other crops to which the insect is
not adapted.
The same thing happens in other situations. A generation or
more ago, the towns of large areas of the
United States lined their streets with the noble elm tree. Now
the beauty they hopefully created is threatened with
complete destruction as disease sweeps through the elms,
carried by a beetle that would have only limited chance to
build up large populations and to spread from tree to tree if the
elms were only occasional trees in a richly
diversified planting. Another factor in the modern
insect problem is one that must be viewed against a
background of geologic and human history: the spreading of
thousands of different kinds of organisms from their
native homes to invade new territories. This worldwide
migration has been studied and graphically described by the
British ecologist Charles Elton in his recent book The Ecology
of Invasions. During the Cretaceous Period, some
hundred mil lion years ago, flooding seas cut many land bridges
between continents and living things found
themselves confined in what Elton calls "colossal separate
nature reserves." There, isolated from others of their kind,
they developed many new species. When some of the land
masses were joined again, about I 5 million years ago,
these species began to move out into new territories a
movement that is not only still in progress but is now
receiving considerable assistance from man.
The importation of plants is the primary agent in the modern
spread of species, for animals have almost
invariably gone along with the plants, quarantine being a
comparatively recent and not completely effective
innovation. The United States Office of Plant Introduction alone
has introduced almost 2oo,ooo species and varieties
of plants from all over the world. Nearly half of the i8o or so
major insect enemies of plants in the United States are

accidental imports from abroad, and most of them have come as
hitchhikers on plants.
In new territory, out of reach of the restraining hand of the
natural enemies that kept down its numbers in its
native land, an invading plant or animal is able to become
enormously abundant. Thus it is no accident that our most
troublesome insects are introduced species.
These invasions, both the naturally occurring and those de
pendent on human assistance, are likely to
continue indefinitely' Quarantine and massive chemical
campaigns are only extremely expensive ways of buying
titne. We are faced, according to Dr. Elton, "with a
lifean'ddeath need not just to find new technological means of
suppressing this plant or that animal"; instead we need the basic
knowledge of animal populations and their relations
to their surroundings that will "promote an even balance and
damp down the explosive power of outbreaks and new
invasions."
Much of the necessary knowledge is now available but we do
not use it. We train ecologists in our
universities and even employ them in our governmental
agencies but we seldom take their advice. We allow the
chemical dtath rain to fall as though there,were no alternative,
whereas in fact there are many, and our ingenuity
could soon discover many more if given opportunity.
Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as
inevitable that which is inferior or
detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to
demand that which is good? Such thinking, in the words
of the ecologist Paul Shepard, "Idealizes life with only its head
out of water, inches above the limits of toleration of
the corruption of its own environment ... Why should we
tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid
surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our
enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to

pre vent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is
just not quite fatal?"
Yet such a world is pressed upon us. The crusade to create a
chemically sterile, insectfree world seems to
have engendered a fanatic zeal on the part of many specialists
and most of the socalled control agencies. On every
hand there is evidence that those engaged in spraying operations
exercise a ruthless power. "The regulatory
entomologists ... function as prosecutor, judge and jury, tax
assessor and collector and sheriff to enforce their own
orders," said Connecticut entomologist Neely Turner. The most
flagrant abuses go unchecked in both state and
federal agencies.
It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be
used. I do contend that we have put
poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately
into the hands of per sons largely or wholly ignorant
of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous
numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without
their consent and often without their knowledge. If the Bill of
Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be
secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private
individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because
our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and
foresight, could conceive of no such problem.
I contend, furthermore, that we have allowed these chemicals
to be used with little or no advance
investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife, and man
himself. Future generations are unlikely to condone our
lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world
that supports all life.
There is still very limited awareness of the nature of the threat.
This is an era of specialists, each of whom

sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the
larger frame into which it fits. It is also an era dominated
by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost
is seldom challenged. When the public protests,
confronted with some obvious evi dence of damaging results of
pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing
pills of half truth. We urgently need an end to these false
assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is
the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect
controllers calculate. The public must decide
whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do
so only when in full possession of the facts. In the
words of Jean Rostand, "The obligation to endure gives us the
right to know."
Surface Waters & Underground Seas
Of all our natural resources water has become the most
precious. By far the greater part of the earth's
surface is covered by its enveloping seas, yet in the midst of
this plenty we are in want. By a strange paradox, most
of the earth's abundant water is not usable for agriculture,
industry, or human consumption because of its heavy load
of sea salts, and so most of the world's population is either
experiencing or is threatened with critical shortages. In an
age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his
most essential needs for survival, water along with
other resources has become the victim of his indifference.
The problem of water pollution by pesticides can be under
stood only in context, as part of the whole to
which it belongs the pollution of the total environment of
mankind. The pollution entering our waterways comes
from many sources: radio active wastes from reactors,
laboratories, and hospitals; fallout from nuclear explosions;
domestic wastes from cities and towns; chemical wastes from
factories. To these is added a new kind of fallout the

chemical sprays applied to croplands and gar dens, forests and
fields. Many of the chemical agents in this alarming
melange imitate and augment the harmful effects of radiation,
and within the groups of chemicals themselves there
are sinister and littleunderstood interactions, transformations,
and summations of effect.
Ever since chemists began to manufacture substances that
nature never invented, the problems of water
purification have become complex and the danger to users of
water has increased..
************
Yet these fish, too, contained DDT. Had the chemical reached
this remote creek by hidden under ground
streams? Or had it been airborne, drifting down as fallout oii
the surface of the creek? In still another compar tive
study, DDT was found in the tissues of fish from a @atch cry
where the water supply originated in a deep 'well.
Again there was no record of local spraying. The only possible
means of contamination seemed to be by means of
groundwater.
In the entire waterpollution problem, there is probably noth
ing more disturbing than the threat of
widespread contamination of groundwater. It is not possible to
add pesticides to water anywhere without threatening
the purity of water everywhere. Seldom if ever does Nature
operate in closed and separate compartments, and she
has not done so in distributing the earth's water supply. Rain,
falling on the land, settles down through pores and
cracks in soil and rock, penetrating deeper and deeper until
eventually it reaches a zone where all the pores of the
rock are filled with water, a dark, subsurface sea, rising under
hills, sinking bene ath valleys. This groundwater is
always on the move, sometimes at a pace so slow that it travels
no more than 5o feet a year, sometimes rapidly, by

comparison, so that it moves nearly a tenth of a mile in a day. It
travels by unseen waterways until here and there it
comes to the surface as a spring, or perhaps it is tapped to feed
a well. But mostly it con tribute, to streams and so to
rivers. Except for what enters streams directly as rain or surface
runoff, all the running water of the earth's surface
was at one time groundwater. And so, in a very real and
frightening sense, pollution of the ground water is pollution
of water everywhere.
It must have been by such a dark, underground sea that
poisonous chemicals traveled from a manufacturing
plant in Colorado to a farming district several miles away, there
to poison wells, sicken humans and livestock, and
damage crops an extraordinary episode that may easily be only
the first of many like it. Its history, in brief, is this.
In 1943, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal of the Army Chemical
Corps, located near Denver, began to manufacture war
materials. Eight years later the facili ties of the arsenal were
leased to a private oil company for the production of
insecticides. Even before the change of opera tions, however,
mysterious reports had begun to come in. Farmers
several miles from the plant began to report unex plained
sickness among livestock; they complained of extensive
crop damage. Foliage turned yellow, plants failed to mature,
and many crops were killed outright, There were
reports of human illness, thought by some to be related.
The irrigation waters on these farms were derived from shallow
wells. When the well waters were
examined (in a study in1958, in which several state and federal
agencies participated) they were found to contain an
assortment of chemicals. Chlorides, chlorates, salts of
phosphonic acid, fluorides, and arsenic had been discharged
from the Rocky Mountain Arsenal into holding ponds during the

years of its operation. Apparently the groundwater
between the arsenal and the farms had become contaminated and
it had taken 7 to 8 years for the wastes to travel
underground a distance of about 3 miles from the holding ponds
to the nearest farm. This seepage had continued to
spread and had further contaminated an area of unknown extent.
The investigators knew of no way to contain the
contamination or halt its advance.
All this was bad enough, but the most mysterious and probably
in the long run the most significant feature
of the whole episode was the discovery of the weed killer 2,4D
in some of the wells and in the holding ponds of the
arsenal. Certainly its presence was enough to account for the
damage to crops irrigated with this water. But the
mystery lay in the fact that no 2,4D had been manufactured at
the arsenal at any stage of its operations.
A disturbing example of (contamination of the surface waters
)seems to be building up on the national
wildlife refuges at Tule Lake and Lower Klamath, both in
California. These refuges are part of a chain including
also the refuge on Upper Klamath Lake just over the border 'in
Oregon. All are linked, perhaps fatefully, by a
shared water supply, and all are affected by the fact that they lie
like small islands in a great sea of sur rounding
farmlands land reclaimed by drainage and stream diversion
from an original waterfowl paradise of marshiand and
open water. These farmlands around the refuges are
now irrigated by water from Upper Klamath Lake.
The irrigation waters, re collected from the fields they have
served, are then pumped into Tule Lake and from there
to Lower Klamath. All of the waters of the wildlife refuges
established on these two bodies of water therefore
represent the drainage of agricultural lands. It is important to
remember this in connection with recent happenings.
In the summer of ig6o the refuge staff picked up hundreds of

dead and dying birds at Tute Lake and Lower
Klamath. Most of them were fisheating species herons,
pelicans, grebes, gulls. Upon analysis, they were found to
contain insecticide residues identified as toxaphene, DDD, and
DDE. Fish from the lakes were also found to contain
insecticides; so did samples of plankton. The refuge manager
believes that pesticide residues are now building up in
the waters of these refuges, being conveyed there by return
irrigation flow from heavily sprayed agricultural lands.
Such poisoning of waters set aside for conservation purposes
could have consequences felt by every
western duck hunter and by everyone to whom the sight and
sound of drifting ribbons of waterfowl across an
evening sky are precious. These particular refuges occupy
critical positions in the conservation of west ern
waterfowl. They lie at a point corresponding to the narrow neck
of a funnel, into which all the migratory paths
composing what is known as the Pacific Flyway converge.
During the fall migration they receive many millions of
ducks and geese from nesting grounds extending from the
shores of Bering Sea east to Hudson Bay fully three
fourths of all the waterfowl that move south into the Pacific
Coast states in autumn. In summer they provide nesting
areas for waterfowl, especially for two endangered species, the
redhead and the ruddy duck. If the lakes and pools of
these refuges become seriously contaminated, the damage to the
waterfowl populations of the Far West could be
irreparable. Water must also be thought of in terms
of the chains of life it supports from the smallasdust
green cells of the drifting plant plankton, through the minute
water fleas to the fishes that strain plankton from the
water and are in turn eaten by other fishes or by birds, mink,
raccoons in an endless cyclic trans fer of materials
from life to life. We know that the necessary rninerals in the
water .ire so passed from link to link of the food chains.
Can we suppose that poisons we introduce into water will not

also enter into these cycles of nature?
The answer is to be found in the amazing history of Clear Lake,
California. Clear Lake ties in mountainous
country some 'les north of San Francisco and has long been
popular with go ml anglers. The name is inappropriate,
for actually it is a rather turbid lake because of the soft black
ooze that covers its shallow bottom. Unfortunately for
the fishermen and the resort dwell ers on its shores, its waters
have provided an ideal habitat for a small gnat,
Cbaoboius astictopus. Although closely related to mosquitoes,
the gnat is not a bloodsucker and probably does not
feed at all as an adult. However, human beings who shared its
habitat found it annoying because of its sheer
numbers. Efforts were made to control it but they were largely
fruitless until, in the late 1940's, the chlorinated
hydrocarbon insecticides offered new weapons. The chemical
chosen for a fresh attack was DDD, a close relative of
DDT but apparently offering fewer threats to fish life.
The new control measures undertaken in 1949 were carefully
planned and few people would have supposed
any harm could result. The lake was surveyed, its volume …

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